


How Way Leads onto Way

by amurderof



Category: Saiyuki
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-09
Updated: 2010-08-09
Packaged: 2017-10-11 00:29:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/106245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amurderof/pseuds/amurderof
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Koumyou chuckled then, and finished his drink. "You must be bored with this old man as your only company."</p>
            </blockquote>





	How Way Leads onto Way

**Author's Note:**

> I kind of think this is... unfinished, but at the same time complete. Or perhaps incomplete but finished. If that makes sense. Which it doesn't. Carry on then!

They had only been traveling for two days when they came upon the thing. It had hidden itself under the shade of an overhanging tree, off to the side of the road; it blinked dully up at Koumyou as he approached it, and even from several feet away Ukoku could see that its eyes were glazed and beginning to crust over with mucus.

"Ukoku," Koumyou beckoned, his hand waving behind him as he squatted in the shade, "come here."

Ukoku glanced down the road -- at the mountains in the distance that the innkeeper had told them signaled the next village and the only truly potable water after they left town -- and set his hand on his head, let his fingers work through his hair.

The smell was overwhelming as he got closer to the thing, crouched next to Koumyou and tried to get a feeling for what it had been before it was cut open and lying under a tree in the middle of nowhere. A dog, left to its own devices and flea-ridden, mud-caked, missing some of its internal organs... The smell was really something: hot meat, a veritable insect smorgasbord, but too cool to make it anything but warmed and raw.

Koumyou reached down, set his palm against the thing's forehead -- it whimpered, and its tongue lolled out past its yellow teeth onto the dirt. Ukoku watched Koumyou's face, his tightly-drawn mouth, his brow lined with concentration. Sweat had gathered above his lips, and Ukoku imagined it in the curve of his ears, the dip of his collarbones, the small of his back.

He brushed the back of his hand across his forehead and watched the concentration on Koumyou's face relax into a smile that Ukoku had memorized. Koumyou had many smiles, but this one seemed to only come in the late hours of night when they had both drunk more than their share and Ukoku leaned against him in his stupor, and the old man spoke of Kouryuu's adventures with the ducks that had taken up in the fountain, and how one morning Koumyou had walked into the courtyard to see Kouryuu following the mother duck and her ducklings as though he were one himself.

Only then, Ukoku thought, and in the presence of dying dogs.

"What should be done?" Koumyou asked him, his voice small, dwarfed by the flies' swarming and the leaves' rustling and the dog's panting.

Pages upon pages of textbooks surfaced in Ukoku's mind, long hours spent studying only to realize that it wasn't hard, none of it was hard, how idiotic they all had to be to study this so intently, so repetitively, when it was so easy. It was a simple answer, then: the jugular could be severed quickly, and while there would be pain it would be brief, and the creature would be almost incapable of perceiving it over what it was already experiencing.

There were other things to draw an answer from, however, and Ukoku knew these things by rote as well -- _I will be mindful and reverential with all life; I will not be violent nor will I kill._ It had been compromised before he'd been named, in the very process of his receiving the sutra; but it was what was expected to be followed, what every monk learned and breathed.

"The heat will take care of it," Ukoku said plainly, then tilted his head to get a better look. He revised, "Its guts falling out of its stomach will take care of it." He stood and wiped his hands against his thighs, then brushed the accumulated dust from his robes and returned to the road.

Koumyou remained squatting. Ukoku's eyes followed the long curve of his spine as he leaned forward, the way his robes gathered between his bent legs, the brief circle of skin above his heel because he'd forgotten to get his tabi darned. Again.

He was not watching Koumyou's hands when they cradled the dog's head and the dog stopped breathing.

Koumyou stood and joined Ukoku in the sun. He held his hands out to Ukoku, and the man stared at Koumyou before realizing he wanted his pack, wanted to wipe his hands on one of the towels he kept stored away. Koumyou's robes were streaked with dust, and he cared about a little dog drool.

"'I shall endeavor to protect and take care of all living creatures,'" Koumyou said much later, when the road had become a path between trees and the light streamed through the interwoven leaves, dappled the earth and Koumyou's hair.

He paused, tipping his head back and closing his eyes, letting the sun touch his jaw and cheek and temple. "What do you think it means?"

Ukoku stopped several steps ahead of him, and looked back. Koumyou's smile was... "I know what it means."

"Hmm?" Koumyou looked at him, and his smile became definable again -- was what he wore when he expected something. "Do you think it was the correct thing to do?"

Ukoku thought of what must have happened, of the dog's heart giving out, of the pain finally being too great; or of Koumyou reaching inside, telling the creature that it could let go, that it would no longer hurt.

"Ah," Koumyou said, and he was standing on the road in front of Ukoku now, having taken advantage of the young man's distraction. "If we don't pick up the pace, we won't make it before nightfall. The ground and my back have an unfortunately abusive relationship..."

Ukoku stared at him, and laughed, and followed.

 

The mayor of the village at the base of the mountain thought it improper that they would arrive with such little pomp and circumstance, regardless of the late hour, and he insisted that they stay at least another day so that their presence could be properly celebrated.

"She likes you," Koumyou said the next evening over the remains of their meal, prepared by the mayor's wife and daughters. Ukoku glanced over his shoulder, saw the youngest -- and only unwed -- of the daughters watching him through her straight, black bangs. Her eyes widened when she realized she'd drawn his attention, and she darted back into the family's kitchen, the heavy wooden door slamming loudly behind her. Without her in front of him, Ukoku was hard-pressed to recall the color of her eyes, of her skin, of her dress.

He turned back to Koumyou, frowning. "Your sense of humor..." He topped off his cup and put it to his lips, but did not drink. Koumyou smiled at him, and he looked back once more, now at the closed door to the kitchen. In the quiet, he could hear women's grating voices twittering at each other.

In his own travels, he had bedded both men and women who had intrigued him -- said something particularly witty during dinner, drawling at the resident ignoramus and laughing sharply when they still didn't get it; or stretched at the exact moment that he looked their way and caught the sweat-slick sliver of stomach between their shirt hem and jeans. A virginal, vapid schoolgirl wouldn't be what enticed him, even if he were alone.

Koumyou chuckled then, and finished his drink. "You must be bored with this old man as your only company."

Ukoku laughed into his own cup.

When they had withdrawn to their respective chambers, Ukoku remained awake, toying with a pack of cigarettes he'd procured from one of the young gentlemen at the "feast" the mayor had provided for them. It wasn't a brand he knew, but then he didn't know anything about cigarettes -- Koumyou smoked pipes, as a general rule, possibly only because he liked the way it made him look when he did it. The smoke had gotten to Ukoku the first several times, not that he would ever let the man know; but he found that after enough time spent in Koumyou's presence, he could understand why pipe smoke was referred to as sweet.

Cigarettes would be anything but, though he could see the appeal regardless. A man in Lijiang had been in possession of distracting cheekbones that he used to great effect when he lit up, cupping his long fingers around the cigarette dangling from his thin lips; and when he inhaled, his face sharpening in a way that begged for the hollows of his cheeks to be licked. Ukoku had tasted the tar staining the man's fingers. Pipe tobacco could only --

The door to what the mayor considered "one of the his two best guestrooms" opened, wide enough for a person to slip through, and with the light spilling in from the hallway Ukoku was able to recognize the outline of the youngest daughter.

She shut the door behind her, leant up against it, and stared at him with her wide eyes. In the half-light she looked even more the virginal child she had been during dinner, though the clinging robe she wore did its best to present her differently, to accentuate her breasts and the dip and curve of her waist and hips.

"Do you --" she started, and then she moved away from the door and towards the bed. She seemed overly interested in the pack of cigarettes on his lap. He laughed -- not at her, not yet at least -- tapped a cigarette out into his hand, and held it out to her.

She looked like a squirrel, poised and ready to flee at the merest provocation. Would it take a sudden movement, or a gunshot? She took the cigarette from him, though, and sat at the other end of the mattress. She kept her knees together. The things she had left to learn about seduction...

"Here," he said, and offered her the lighter he'd lifted from the same idiot he'd taken the cigarettes from. She took it in one of her tiny hands and, biting the cigarette between her teeth, clicked the lighter once, twice -- and coughed when she managed her first inhalation.

The mayor must have been sorely desperate to scale the social ladder if _she_ was what he felt would appeal to a priest. Ukoku could imagine the kind of man who was drawn in by her idiocy, and it was nearly an insult that the mayor thought him to be that kind of man. He could bed her regardless; it would be a chore -- she was clearly terrified, and what fun could be had without educated reciprocation -- but when he and Koumyou _left_ in the morning it could serve as a swift comeuppance. The man who'd made off with his precious child's virginity, leaving before the sun had fully risen...

Koumyou would, of course, know what had transpired.

"Get," Ukoku muttered, toeing at her back with one of his feet. She looked up from the cigarette, which apparently fascinated her, and stared at him with those idiotic doe eyes of hers.

"If it's --" she said, and he was beginning to think she was incapable of completing a sentence. She bit her bottom lip. She _did_ have a nice mouth. "It wasn't meant to imply that you are a man of loose morals."

Ukoku did laugh at that, at her, and she jumped to her feet, dropping the cigarette to the floorboards. "This isn't about sex." He leant over the bed, picked up the pack of cigarettes and the lighter. "If I'm going to steal something, it will be something I actually want."

Her mouth went perfectly circular in her surprise -- embarassment? offense? -- and she hastily retreated back into the hallway. The door shut behind her with enough of a slam that she had to alert the rest of the household.

Ukoku snorted, leaning back against the headboard. He put a cigarette between his lips and lit it, breathing in and holding the smoke in his lungs. It... _burned_.

He snubbed the thing out on the bedpost and coughed more than exhaled.

 

Koumyou seemed to know what had transpired the night before regardless, or at least his smile made Ukoku think so. The man's eyes crinkled, and his mouth curved and showed his teeth, and he rose from the table in the mayor's sitting room and motioned Ukoku to lead the way outside.

It was early yet and the cicadas were only now waking: the silence of the morning was broken by brief bursts of their high-voiced droning. No one had even been up in time to see them off, but perhaps Koumyou had planned that. If he truly considered it, Ukoku preferred that, though as he angled his straw hat to block the rays of the rising sun he felt pangs of regret for not having the chance to enjoy the mayor's blustering outrage, or mortification. The man would have to find some other traveling gentleman to foist her off onto, someone who would forsake the road and his future for what lay between tender thighs.

To his side, Koumyou made a small sound and deviated from the path. The road was well-tended -- which struck Ukoku as odd considering the relative size of the village and that there was little else in the area -- but nature was doing its damnedest to impose itself back upon the cleared stretch, and apparently Koumyou had found something about this that appealed to him.

Ukoku joined him, half-expecting another dying dog awaiting Koumyou's strange brand of mercy, but instead Koumyou was crouched above a small cluster of green leaves that looked like any other small cluster of green leaves . Koumyou smiled at it, and reached down and touched one leaf delicately, the pads of his fingers barely moving the leaf at all. "It's trying so hard," he said, and the delight in his voice trickled down Ukoku's spine, settled in a wholly unsettling way in his stomach.

Ukoku snorted a laugh. "It'll grow or it won't," he said.

Koumyou looked up at him over his shoulder, and replied, "You are very astute, Ukoku," and then he laughed at him, stood slowly and wiped his hands on the front of his robes -- which had just been cleaned, Ukoku almost said, and if he was going to go around messing them up again so soon after then what was the point. But Koumyou was placing his hand on Ukoku's shoulder, his fingers small points of heat that Ukoku could _feel_ through the layers he wore, and saying, his voice low and soft between them, "It is said that when observing a hydrangea blossom, one is able to lose oneself in the abundance of its petals."

Ukoku glanced at the struggling plant -- a hydrangea that did not have the strength to bloom, he assumed -- and nodded. He'd heard the symbolism before, and he snorted before he said, "Losing yourself in your thoughts while staring at a flower blossom as a means to reach enlightenment..." He was going to continue, say that it was foolish and unnecessary because it _was_, but Koumyou had taken a piece of Ukoku's robe between his thumb and forefinger and was feeling the fabric, contemplatively.

"If you are able to lose yourself in your thoughts," Koumyou said, and then he smiled at Ukoku as he had smiled at the hydrangea and Ukoku felt small; and then he made the delighted sound he had when it had first caught his attention and Ukoku felt significant.

And then he stepped away from him and adjusted his pack, and resumed walking down the path, only to pause when he was several steps ahead and wait, a patient smile crinkling his face. "Are you coming, or shall we wait for the hydrangea to bloom?"

Ukoku felt his mouth form words, a twisted type of muscle memory, his lips eager to shape some rejoinder -- but his mind was concentrated elsewhere, was breaking down the heavy tension nesting between his lungs, behind his ribs, at the base of his throat -- and he merely exhaled, and followed him.

When they finally stopped to rest, and for lunch, the sun was perched high above them. Koumyou made subtle complaints about the stress of travel on old bones and settled underneath a tallow-tree, and laid out a collection of foods that he must have asked to be packed for them from the leftovers of the mayor's abundance.

Ukoku sat next to him, and together they ate, and Ukoku choked on a mouthful of rice when Koumyou asked him if he had slept well.

"Oh!" Koumyou exclaimed, and blinked several times before leaning over and patting him on the back.

Ukoku waved him off, and spat what little rice was left in his mouth and hadn't escaped into his _lungs_ into a napkin, before eyeing Koumyou over the rim of his glasses. He knew exactly what he'd done, regardless of the innocuous expression on his face.

But Koumyou passed him water, and henpecked about how young men were always biting off far more than they could chew; and as Ukoku drank it occurred to him that perhaps Koumyou _didn't_ realize the full weight of his question, and that was even more maddening.

"Surely you know," Ukoku finally said, when he no longer feared asphyxiation.

Koumyou nodded. "My mattress was overly firm, but I wasn't certain whether or not you had suffered the same fate."

"My mattress was fine," Ukoku snapped, and he took another swig of water. "But my bed was cold."

"Hm." Koumyou gently took the water from him and drank, and Ukoku watched his lips curve around the bottle, the way his throat moved as he swallowed. Koumyou noticed his stare and handed the bottle back to him, smiling. "We shall have to ask for your sheets to be warmed, in the next town."

He proceeded to pack up the excess food, and then stood and ventured out from the shade into the bright sunlight. He held his straw hat in his hand and tilted his head up towards the sky, closing his eyes and smiling. The sun washed out his features, colored his whole being a rich yellow.

Eventually he held out his other hand, his fingers curling, beckoning. "Are you coming, Ukoku? We've a ways yet to go."

A ways yet, Ukoku thought. He pursed his lips, and finished off the water.

And then he went.


End file.
